1. Field of the Invention
This disclosure relates to the field of electronic commerce, and more particularly to the field of tunneling technology.
2. Description of the Related Art
The advent of the computer and the computer network, particularly the Internet, has revolutionized the ways people communicate and the ways people store, retrieve and manipulate data. An important function of the Internet is electronic commerce through which people shop for and procure various goods, services and information. In a typical electronic commerce transaction a user browses an Internet site that displays content related to goods, services, or information that the user may wish to procure. In addition, a typical electronic commerce transaction requires the user to enter various data into forms or fields on the Internet site, such as the user's name, address, zip code, telephone number, credit card number, quantity of item selected, and the like. Thus, a typical Internet electronic commerce transaction is enabled by a combination of display content (which might include static content, audio, video, sounds, or other displays) and transactional content (which may include any exchange of data that supports the underlying procurement of, or ordering of, goods, services, or information through the site or other similar content).
A well-known problem with the Internet is that of limited transmission speeds. A combination of limited bandwidth, due to the presence of twisted pair copper wires and other low-bandwidth physical transmission media, and transmission delays, such as queuing and routing delays, means that Internet pages can be slow to load, so that Internet navigation is slow, as are some electronic commerce transactions. Delays are particularly acute for so-called “rich media” content, including dynamic content such as animation, video, and audio. Thus, rich media content used in electronic commerce, such as advertisements, can impair the performance of Internet sites that display such content.
Some solutions have been implemented to reduce the problems of Internet performance. One such solution is web caching. Web caching solutions of a variety of types have been created by Akamai, Sandpiper, Cidera, AT&T, Inktomi, Alteon and f5, among others. Web caching locates Internet content closer to the user who is interacting with an Internet site. Closeness may be measured in terms of performance, rather than geographic proximity. For example, frequently accessed content may be located on a server that is located fewer network nodes away from end users who are likely to access it or can be located on higher speed machines or transmission services. Web caching results in faster delivery of information over the Internet.
A number of problems exist with web caching. One problem is the nature of content that is cached, namely, static content such as GIF files, static HTML pages, audio files and video files. Although this content represents a significant portion of a given web page, a large amount of content is not cached, such as dynamic content and transactional content. This is because dynamic content is often based on the cookie settings of particular users and because data for transactional content must travel all the way back and forth between origin servers. Since the content can be specific to a user, it can be difficult to cache the content close to a user. That is, the content for one user may need to be in a different place from the content of a second user. When the shear number of users of the Internet is taken into account, the problem becomes quite clear that there is no single location where dynamic content can be cached.
A need exists for a solution that improves Internet performance for situations involving static, dynamic and transactional content.